His Ancestry.

George Grey was born at Lisbon on April 14, 1812. The place and the time were alike significant. His mother was one of a group of wives of English officers who tarried in the Portuguese capital while their husbands were in the field. Born out of England, George Grey was destined to spend almost all the years of his manhood and old age in distant lands. The place was prophetic. The time was no less notable. Genius often rises in constellations, and the year of the great governor's birth was that also of a great poet, Robert Browning, of a great chancellor, Lord Selborne, of a great humanist, Mark Pattison, of a great apostate, William George Ward, and of a great abolitionist, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, while it was also or nearly that of two great novelists, Thackeray and Dickens. If his claim to Huguenot descent through his mother was well-founded, he was a notable member of a remarkable group—the Newmans, the Martineaus, the Mialls, Herbert Spencer, and many others—through whom a foreign infusion enriched the public life and the culture of England. Whether a certain disloyalty of character of which we shall have more to say may be justly ascribed to the Huguenot strain in his blood, it would be hazardous to speculate. To his less problematical Irish extraction Grey probably owed the winning manner that made him liked by men and adored by women, and the eloquent tongue that led all hearts captive. The vindictive passions that played so large a part in his life may have had the same origin, or they may have been the natural outcome of the imperious temper that bore him to eminence and was also the source of all his reverses.